Marcel Hirscher
Hermann Maier
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Marcel Hirscher leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Marcel Hirscher at #3 and Hermann Maier at #6.
The case for Marcel Hirscher
The most dominant season-long racer in the history of the men's circuit. Hirscher won eight consecutive overall Crystal Globes from 2012 to 2019, a run no alpine skier of either sex has approached — Marc Girardelli's five had stood as the men's record since 1993 — and did it against the deepest technical fields the sport has staged, with Austria alone able to field a dozen plausible podium contenders. He finished with 67 World Cup wins, split between giant slalom and slalom, and seven world championship golds. The one gap was Olympic: after a silver in Sochi he finally won giant slalom and combined gold at Pyeongchang in 2018. He retired at 30 in perfect health, then returned in 2024 racing under the flag of the Netherlands, his mother's country, an unprecedented late-career switch that reopened a career everyone assumed was closed.
The case for Hermann Maier
The Herminator, a bricklayer rejected by the Austrian ski academy as a teenager for being too small, who arrived on the World Cup at 23 and immediately rebuilt the sport's idea of how hard a racer could attack. Maier won 54 World Cup races and four overall titles in 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2004, and his 2,000 points in 1999-2000 stood as the men's record for 23 years. His defining week came at Nagano in 1998: a crash in the downhill that launched him through two safety fences at over 100 km/h and was replayed worldwide, followed three days later by super-G gold and giant slalom gold. In August 2001 a motorcycle accident nearly cost him his right leg; he missed two seasons, returned in 2003, won the super-G globe in his comeback season and the overall title the year after. Nobody in the sport's history has recovered from more.